Jitterbugging for Jesus

To frame Revelation in military history terms …

American forces that landed at Normandy and pushed back the Nazis on D-Day won the war on that eventful day: from that day on the future belonged to the Allied forces.

And yet the ultimate victory was yet to be won–the American and Allied forces had a lot of challenging military work to do until the fullness of the war’s win at Omaha Beach was realized.

That’s how it is in the big Christian scheme of things. We know that the victory over death and evil was accomplished on Resurrection Day.

And yet . . . the victory has not yet been fully accomplished.

Until it is, we hope-filled Christians have work to do in advancing the kingdom of God and Heaven that Jesus ushered in. We still have our banners to carry in what are often thorny and even dangerous fields.

Richard Bauckham, the esteemed British scholar on Revelation who I’ve featured in this series about Revelation a couple of times before, has preached some wonderful sermons from the about the biblical book.

Here’s a quotable excerpt about living out the values of Jesus in this mad, mad, mad, mad world from one of Dr. Bauckham’s sermons on Advent, with my italics for emphasis:

If the future belongs to Jesus Christ, it belongs to the people who live as Jesus did–not the ambitious self-seeking people who carve out a future for themselves, but the people who live lives of love and service, often largely unnoticed, gaining no credit for themselves, notching up no obvious achievements, giving up perhaps the futures they might have had for themselves in order to devote themselves to others. These are the people to whom the future belongs because it belongs to Jesus Christ.

Therefore, since we know that the future of the world is Jesus Christ’s future, we can live our own lives towards that future. We need not be taken in by the way the world seems to be going, we need not imagine that the way the world is the way it must be, we need not accept that the future belongs to the people and the forces that seem to have the power to create it and to destroy it.

In the end the future belongs to Jesus Christ. So we can live against the grain of our world, we can live out the values of Jesus, we can come alongside the suffering and the excluded, the neglected and the dying, we can oppose injustice and defy death, we can do all these things because–whatever appearances might suggest–they are the direction in which the future lies.

A lot of good things go on in our world that may not often make the headlines. There are people and groups and movements whose first priority is the sort of needy people Jesus cared most about. …

There are also people who work for peace and justice and the good of God’s creation in the corridors of power. We need to support them too with prayer and encouragement. These are the ways we can practice hope. These are ways we can live the conviction that the future belongs to Jesus Christ and to his priorities for the world. We cannot single-handedly create the future, which is God’s to give. But we can live in the direction of his future.

The whole sermon–“The Future of Jesus Christ”–can be found here.

Today’s takeaway:

25. “We cannot single-handedly create the future, which is God’s to give. But we can live in the direction of his future.”